Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard was born in 1098, according to tradition as the tenth child of Hildebert and Mechtild, a family of the lower nobility in the service of the counts of Sponheim. Her birthplace is not known with certainty: Bermersheim vor der Höhe is the traditional place, but recent research also names Niederhosenbach. According to her Vita she had visions from childhood.

As a child she was entrusted to Jutta of Sponheim, who lived in an anchorage at the monastery of Disibodenberg. Her Vita gives her age as eight (about 1106); other evidence places the enclosure on 1 November 1112. Jutta taught her to read and write; Hildegard later called herself unlearned, which historians partly read as a rhetorical choice.

After Jutta's death in 1136 the community elected Hildegard as magistra. Around 1141 she began to record her visions; Scivias ('Know the Ways', completed around 1151) arranges 26 visions on creation, redemption and the Church. Later visionary works were the Liber vitae meritorum (1158–1163) and the Liber divinorum operum (about 1163–1174).

She composed liturgical chants, collected in the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, and the sung play Ordo Virtutum, an early musical drama not tied to a liturgy. Her songs are monophonic, with strikingly wide-ranging melodies; she wrote the texts herself.

Her works on nature and medicine, Physica and Causae et curae, describe plants, stones, animals and diseases within medieval humoral theory; researchers discuss the transmission and composition of these texts. She also wrote nearly four hundred letters and devised her own secret language, the Lingua ignota.

The twelfth century was a time of church reform and monastic renewal. The Rhineland had many Benedictine and Cistercian communities, and conflicts between Church and Emperor formed the political background. Hildegard corresponded with popes such as Eugenius III and Anastasius IV, with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and with Bernard of Clairvaux.

For women, opportunities for public authority were limited; an abbess who wrote on theology and preached publicly was exceptional. Hildegard legitimised her activity by appealing to divine inspiration and received church support at the Synod of Trier (1147–1148). There was also criticism, including of her decision to admit mainly women of noble birth.

Abbots, abbesses, bishops and princes asked Hildegard for advice and prayer. Between about 1158 and 1171 she made four preaching tours, including to Mainz, Trier, Cologne and Swabia, in which she denounced abuses within the Church and called for reform. That a woman preached in public was unusual for the time.

Her convents at the Rupertsberg and in Eibingen offered women a communal life. The Rupertsberg convent was destroyed in 1632 during the Thirty Years' War; the community moved to Eibingen, where her relics are kept. Her works were gathered in the Riesenkodex, probably under her own supervision towards the end of her life.

Hildegard died on 17 September 1179 at the Rupertsberg. Shortly before, a conflict arose with the clergy of Mainz over the burial of a man who had died excommunicated; her community was temporarily placed under an interdict, later lifted. After her death a Vita was compiled, among others by Theoderic of Echternach.

Her veneration was regional for centuries; since the end of the sixteenth century she has appeared in the Roman Martyrology. On 10 May 2012 Pope Benedict XVI extended her veneration to the whole Catholic Church (a so-called equivalent canonisation), and on 7 October 2012 he named her a Doctor of the Church. Later movements such as 'Hildegard medicine' are modern and differ from historical research on her texts.